I wonder if politicians or politicians’ strategists have a kind of index above or below which they acknowledge that the electorate registers an idea or a feeling in their deep vote-bearing being. As we speak, it looks as if the Saudi journalist Jamal Kasooghi has been murdered in the Saudi embassy in Istanbul by agents of the Saudi regime. This barbaric act looks to have registered on the collective consciousness more than the killing of some tens of thousands of innocents in Yemen, mainly because it represents a personal narrative. Personal story scores higher than abstract statistic on the resonance scale. The question is whether there is a statistical way for politicials to appreciate this and integrate this disparity of perception into their machinations, some algorithm of dreadfulness. What is clear, though, is that some clever imaginer needs to find a way of talking about abstract figures of deaths in wars and bombings that can strum the heart strings or nervous systems of your everyday member of the public to gain the same reponse as the single, albeit bloody and awful, death of one person.

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These days you are nowhere without a lanyard. Is it lanyard or is it lanyon? Where has this word emerged from anyway? No matter, you need a lanyard. If you are wearing a lanyard around your neck, best to also have a collection of important keys on another tape clattering around as you walk importantly along. Some men, or women, wear keys, or lanyards, on their belt. If this is the case, they jingle around in the vicinity of your genitalia. Why not indeed? These, lanyards and keys, are signs of ownership. You are owned when you wear the lanyard. You do the owning when you wear the keys. Our whole life is owning or being owned, these symbols seem to say. Some people love the lanyard. They wear it when they are out and about town. It leaps joyously about their necks in the sunshine, clattering on their manly or womanly breasts. Though there are cheeky ways to sabotage its dominion. You turn it round so that the face offered to the world is no more than the plastic back with your jolly mug shot up sheer against your shirt, or else, and this is my secret way, you tuck its badge bit in between two buttons on your shirt, so that there is no way of identifying you, and if stopped you raise up your hands, present palms, guiltless as you like, and say, oh I’m sorry, I can’t think how my lanyard leapt into that gap between two shirt buttons to seek refuge. That’s the way it is with the lanyard these days. Like with so many things, it’s a game of high stakes cat and mouse.

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My teeth are going through a barren phase. That’s unusual, and good for me. Mostly with my teeth it’s a roller-coaster ride. I am driven from one crisis to the next, but for the last couple of years things have settled down. It all started when I was eight and smashed my just sprouted new second front tooth into Patrick Mangan’s head in the playground. We had gone up for a header and my tooth snapped straight across into his head and left him with eleven stitches. My mum took me to the dental hospital in Manchester and they gave me a silver tooth, waiting till the remaining stub had grown to fit a crown when I was eighteen. From that day on, people called me silver tooth, as though I were a gunslinger in a Western. In those days dentists drilled with gay abandon. They almost drilled the teeth right out of my head. When I went to Paris and opened my mouth to my first female dentist the first thing she did was laugh and say (I’m translating from the French) ‘Now that’s what I call filled!’. With your mouth open, prone on a dentist’s chair, that’s an uncomfortable position to be in. Things came to a head in London and I decided that my one luxury in life would be a fancy private dentist. I did not want them all to gradually disappear. I had some implants, let them drill into the bone, which is not as bad as it sounds, closed my eyes as the blood flowed into my mouth and got sucked up by the sucker. So, you see, having a barren phase in tooth work suits me just fine. The worst, for teeth at least, is over.

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My interest in sport has reached an all-time low. The football season has started up and I’m not interested. This may be the oversaturation that came with the World Cup mania this summer but it may well be something that runs deeper than that. It could be that I have reached the tipping point on old gits like Mourinho having every priceless word pored over by fawning or brow-beaten journalists. It might be the depressingly predictable selection of sleeve tattoos sported by the players, or their bleak collection of beards and haircuts. It might be the tiresome interviews and their PR vetted responses. It all seems processed, mediated, dull, ridden with commercial preoccupations. It could be that this year is the moment that I switch off. That appointment with Match of the Day no longer plays a role in my subconscious (as a boy it was the main date of the week). This would be part of a pattern. Cricket and I parted company many years ago. The idea of sitting for an entire day at the Oval watching distant young men in white, or in pyjamas, depending on which subset of the game we’re viewing, now seems senseless to me. I’d rather eat biscuits at home or have a walk some place or look at some shop windows. I really couldn’t care less about Anderson’s Figures or Cook’s Average or Broad’s Maiden. They sound more like a set of mathematical laws to me these days. There are other sports. The astounding monotony of Formula One. The dire smugness of golf. The unbearable dullness of the tennis interview. The awefulness of the fist pump. As a boy I was the sporty one. My big brother was the clever one. If I’m sporty now, it is of the Train Alone variety (see post of same name). The culture and communality of sport is fast losing its gloss.

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The other day I saw a man carrying a full-length mirror in the park. It made me think of the line by Stendhal where he compared the novel to a mirror you carry down a road. It was an allusion played on by Nabokov at the start of one of his novels (The Gift, I think), which starts with some removal men carrying a mirror across a street. Objects (household or other) are interesting when pulled out of their usual context. I suppose that was one of the things about Marcel Duchamp’s urinal when it was placed in an art gallery. The context resets our viewing of an object, makes us view it emblematically or mundanely. On the bus this morning a little boy was hammering a kind of plastic soldier on the back of my seat. When he dropped it the mother went to pick it up and I saw it was a figurine of Jesus Christ in the pose where he is holding his hands out to us and his heart, his so-called sacred heart, is revealed to us with the chest bone stripped away. Out of context you are forced to look at objects in a different way. That is why places are sacred. You should not be sexting in a church. One of the last football matches I went to was Fulham v Man Utd at Craven Cottage (this was when United were good) and while the match was going on I was talking about Wagner’s Ring with one of my friends. After United scored their fouth goal (Tevez scored a hat-trick I think) a steward came over and threatened to expel us as trouble-makers. We were bringing unsacred material into a sacred place. We were talking filth in the Holy Tabernacle.

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I was walking through the shopping centre next to Russell Square and I saw this gym out of the corner of my eye. It said ‘Train Alone’. And I thought that’s a clever marketing idea, the romance of the solitary trainer, pushing yourself to your limits. And I thought that’s the modern age, people alone with their headphones on their own regime. I was thinking of that film ‘Marathon Man’ from the 1970s and Dustin Hoffman running alone round the gritty streets of New York training for the marathon, with a line I remember from it that he had trained himself for pain and so was able to resist the torture he was put under later in the film. That’s right, I thought. I must get my running shoes out and beat a solitary path round the gritty South London streets again. I moved a little closer to the shop front of the gym to examine their original and off-beat strategy. It wasn’t ‘Train Alone’. It was ‘Never Train Alone’. Ah!

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It all started to go wrong with monotheism. One god controlling us all; one world view; one way of doing things. It was so much better with the multiple gods of Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome with their suite of gods of the hearth and home, for love, for communication. It was even nice that you could create your own gods. Emperor Augustus given an upgrade. Caligula giving himself a (maybe premature) upgrade. The more you spread the power the better. In fact, so called primitive beliefs and superstitions often do a good job. I remember many years ago someone asked me where and when I was born. A week later she gave me a cassette with a 90 minutes analysis of my sun sign, rising sign, the situation of the moon and planets at the time of my birth. For the first time I was described as “difficult”. I had never seen myself as “difficult”, always seen myself as a simple open type. Just the proposal of another pointed alternative struck me hard. It made me look at my life in a different way. We do not have ways of looking at ourselves; we need a filter to examine our own behaviour. There are other ways of doing it. Reading a novel you live a vicarious life via the adventures of a protagonist. Identifying or not identifying with a character in a film. Subconsciously, through this process of identification, we undertake an auto-analysis. Without these filters it is difficult. Astrology is useful fun. Much more useful than the notion of the one Big Brother god.

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These days you have to be a master logician to unpick your own moral or ethical standpoint on most issues. You’ll be pleased to know that advertizing has got wind of this and is delighting in complicating the unravelling. I have never liked the National Lottery. True, you have a slim chance of winning a pile of money and the money goes to causes you might like (you might like shovelling money into that new opium of the people that is sport) but, on the other hand, it fosters a chancer’s approach to life and it takes its money from those people who do not have it to spare. Now the Lottery is blurring the tracks even more with its message that when you win you can help your mates (when you win, who wins with you?) and its suite of heart-warmers (‘Archie helped me when I was down. I’d give him a nice lump sum’. Who wants to deprive old Archie od some money to do up his old garden shed?). How can modern man shun Archie’s old shed? My advice to modern man: keep pouring an ice bucket onto your own heart. The other example of this that has always stuck in my throat is the Pudsie-style BBC-organised celebrity-led charities based on sport or entertainent that constantly constellate our Saturday-night entertainment schedules. Again, the money that members of the public raise or donate is for good causes, but the culture that produces it (celebrity-led, sentimentalized sponging of money from those least able to afford it) is deeply unpleasant. It’s also rubbish telly. Newscasters dancing and dancers newscasting; singers telling you about their favourite books and television actors playing football. The man who once played ‘Dr Who’ telling me off. Some comedian who put his money in an off-shore bank not smiling when he shows pictures of poverty in the world. It’s dystopia. Once again it is the business of a gentle blackmail telling us to give money or feel bad. Unpicking how you feel globally about issues that are intentionally complexified by various institutions is a fact of life these days. You get to feel bad for free. Or, rather, feeling bad has become the entertainment they feed us.

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The recent rise of me-too culture, a more analytical way of looking at gender is only bringing into popular culture trends that have existed in academia for decades. It has been a slow filtering process. It makes me wonder how much of the drifts of literary theory are applicable to real life and individual behaviour. What are the basic tenets of literary theory? Here they are, as I see them: politics is in everything; human nature is not as universal and unchanging as has been thought; language is a key problem zone for thinking; you need to get altitude to look at things clearly sometimes; nothing is sacred.
Most of this stuff is actually applicable to the self. The self is a shiftable shape and we need to see things from other points of view sometimes. It’s actually the same material of theory, of structuralism et al. Common sense.

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In the summer, insects take back control. It starts simply. There are too many flies buzzing around you, parking themselves on your forkfull of al-fresco chicken, kamikazee smashing into window panes, evading your swats (hard to outwit a fly). Underfoot more species present themselves, fatter, longer, highly tinted. You realize that it is they who have dominion over the earth, not us. Their reign goes on quietly through winter, but in summer it is incontrovertible. Then mosquitoes arrive. What had been a pleasant stay on the Mediterranean transmutes over the week into an attempt to limit bite damage. In the end you just want to go home to the darker north. There is also the idea of a snake. The snake is mostly an idea, but you know they are there. Lizards I can deal with. They are sudden zig-zags on the wall with very human shifts of their stance and centre of gravity, as if they were wearing boots and constantly needed to get onto the right axis. But the snake is alien. There is nothing human about a snake. There would be no compromise with a snake. A snake was seen as we hiked up a steep slope away from a river pool in the Cevennes. Not by me. But it was seen. I am glad I didn’t see it and only heard about it. If I had seen it it would have infiltrated into my dreams. I’m less squeamish about spiders though I don’t see myself picking them up. Whereas I am very happy picking up a daddy-long-legs to carry it over to the front doot and help it out into the fresh air. i actually enjoy the expulsion of a daddy-long-legs. It’s one small zone where my manhood can flourish. The other is opening jars. For the rest, forget it.

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